Archives

April, 2008

Anne Ishii is a writer, consultant and blogger (http://ill-iterate-anne.blogspot.com) specializing in pop culture and publishing. She has written for The Village Voice, BUST, Giant Robot and various other print and online outfits, on top of translating for outlets such as WNET/Thirteen and Pantheon.…...

Sunday marked the end of Columbia's three-day Graduate Student Translation Conference. Panel discussions revolved around various aspects of the work, business and craft of translation. Chad Post recaps the conference highjinks over at Three Percent. We're also lucky to have more on-the-ground reportage…...

March, 2008

Market share of world literature is dominated by U.S. publishing conglomerates and literary agents who, together with their British counterparts, are increasingly promoting celebrities rather than professional writers in order to maximize revenue and profits. Thanks to the former British empire and today's…...

The Pan-African Literary Forum announces its Summer Writers' Conference, as well as two scholarships that will take the winners, with all-expenses paid, to Ghana to attend. The conference will gather both established and emerging writers from Africa, the Diaspora and around the world for a series of…...

A couple of weeks ago on a cold night I walked to the Mercantile Libraryfor the first time in all these years that I have been living in Manhattan I have to admitto listen to a discussion about literature in translation, organized by this excellent website. The space turned out a little bit…...

Jerome of Stridonium is the patron saint of theological learning in the Roman Catholic Church and is also recognized as a saint by the Eastern Orthodox Church. Remembered in particular for his version of the Old Testament based on the Hebrew texts, he is credited for the principle of translating ísense…...

Hot off the presses...the winners of the 2008 PEN Translation Fund grants... PEN Translation Fund Announcement of 2008 Grant Recipients The PEN Translation Fund, now celebrating its fifth year of existence, is pleased to announce the winners of this year's competition. Out of a stellar field of 123 applicants,…...

Many readers of WWB will probably still remember the exchange between historian Paul Kennedy and translator Esther Allen in the letters section of Harper's Magazine in fall of 2002. In his letter, Kennedy cited the critical assessment of the Arab world in the UN's recent Arab Human Development…...

Sophie Powell is the author of the novel The Mushroom Man, which has been translated into several languages, as well as several short stories and essays. Raised in London and on a sheep farm in Wales, she is a graduate of Cambridge University (BA Classics) and New York University (MFA Creative Writing,…...

WWB translator and author Daniel Borzutzky will be appearing this Sunday, March 9, 2008, at Myopic Books in Chicago along with Mark Tardi, Joel Calahan, and V. Joshua Adams. The Myopic Poetry series has dubbed the event A Night of Translation, which could imply that the poets will be reading original…...

Grants, awards and prizes such as the Nobel Prize in literature, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the Marsh Award for Children's Literature in Translation, help put writers and their translators under the spotlight and boost sales. The TA's Translation…...

Rebecca Myers holds an MA in English from The University of Georgia and an MFA in Poetry from NYU. She is the full-time assistant to poet Sharon Olds. A resident of Brooklyn, Rebecca is currently writing a collection of creative non-fiction essays called "Poetry at Work," a humorous account of how poetry…...

While looking for something else, I recently stumbled upon Cynthia Ozick's essay íPublic Intellectualsë in her collection Quarrel and Quandary. The essay itself is worth readingas is the whole collectionbut this sentence stuck to my mind: íSelf-blame can be the highest…...

February, 2008

Amitava Kumar and Michael Ryan edit the Rotten English issue of Politics and Culture. The issue takes its cue from Dohra Ahmad's book Rotten English: A Literary Anthology. The title of the book comes from Ken Saro-Wiwa's Sozaboy: A Novel in Rotten English. What are Saro-Wiwa and Ahmad getting at? Mandakini…...

Hosam Aboul-Ela teaches in the department of English and the program in World Cultures and Literatures at the University of Houston. He has lived most of his life in two exotic foreign countries—Egypt and Texas. He is the English translator of the novels Voices by Soleiman Fayyad and Distant Train…...

Raport z oblężonego miasta Report from a Besieged City by Cynthia Haven In the final installment in our discussion on Zbigniew Herbert's Collected Poems Cynthia Haven leads us through Herbert's Report from a Besieged City. We're deeply grateful for both Cynthia's and James's wonderful…...

Dialogue and debate on issues surrounding literary translation at talks, workshops, summer schools and residence programmesalong with translation studies courses covering linguistic concepts, theories and practiceare crucial for professionals in the field to connect and keep up to date. Ego…...

Reading what passes for the interview nowadays, one often wonders if the author has died—and been replaced by their publicist. So when we run across a genuinely-engaged literary conversation in the mainstream press, one almost wants to shout from the rooftops. Here is one such conversation between…...

Alix Ohlin is the author of The Missing Person, a novel, and Babylon and Other Stories. She lives in Easton, Pennsylvania. In her first post for WWB, she talks about her experience at the Château de Lavigny in Switzerland, the writers' residency established by Heinrich Maria Ledig-Rowohlt. Alix…...

Recently I was having a conversation with a friend about literary malaise, or to be more precise, we were talking about malaise in general. We reached the conclusion that there are quite a few different types of malaise, and that a certain comfort can be found in malaise. What would a politician running…...

Earlier this month, Words Without Borders featured a piece by Lawrence Venuti on the business side of publishing books in translation. Venuti's article was written for the Frankfurt Book Fair Panel on To Be Translated or Not to Be, the report by Esther Allen, the Ramon Llull Institute and various PEN…...

The streets of Karachi are alive. Each day, as we drive out, there is something new to see, to read: all the walls around the city are plastered with political slogans, candidate endorsements and poetry in calligraphic-style Urdu and roughly-written English. When growing up, I never paid much attention…...

Whilst writing about English PEN's "Writers in Translation" committee, of which I am a member—tapping into my experiences as an editor, agent and publicist—the idea of doing a fun, but far from definitive listing, the A to Z Of Literary Translation, came to mind. oOo Artistry and adaptation…...

Andrzej Franaszek is a literary critic and cultural editor of the Polish weekly Tygodnik Powszechny. He is the author of Ciemne źródło (Dark Spring), which discusses the subject of suffering in the poetry of Zbigniew Herbert (the second edition will be published later in 2008). He is also…...

From to time to time, a Dutch publisher will ask me to write a preface or an afterword to a book he plans to publish. I have written prefaces for authors as different as Machiavelli, Stendhal and Boris Vian. Last November I received a letter from a publisher, asking if I was interested in writing a preface…...

About Words Without Borders

Words Without Borders opens doors to international exchange through translation, publication, and promotion of the best international literature. Every month we publish select prose and poetry on our site. In addition we develop print anthologies, work with educators to bring literature in translation into classrooms, host events with foreign authors, and maintain an extensive archive of global writing.read more »